Remember when everyone was really excited about Arrested Development resurrecting itself on Netflix? And remember how no one could agree if it was good, bad, or just terribly mediocre when the season did come out? Well, if series creator Mitch Hurwitz has his way, another season of Arrested Development might very well become a reality.
Speaking to Esquire, Hurwitz speculated on the possibilities of another season of the show while ostensibly discussing his new Netflix series Lady Dynamite. Despite mixed fan reception, it sounds like Hurwitz is still dedicated to trying to get a fifth season of Arrested Development made, if he can manage to get the disparate and rather popular cast back together again. He also thinks that the series managed to be accidentally topical, and would like to see if he can do that again.
Here’s what Hurwitz had to say about that:
I’m always trying to move forward with that project regardless of what else is going on in my life. One of the challenges has been a big studio owns it and they don’t make TV this way typically. They sign actors for multiple years of a show, and then they shoot. We’ll get half of the actors available and we won’t quite commit to making the deal, then we’ll lose the other half of the actors. I spent some time in the writers room developing an outline for the next season or seasons if we’re able to make a deal. I’m trying very hard to get it done because we have a great story to tell.
The clock is ticking. We were putting up a wall before Trump was. There were so many things like that. We had a political race that was going to continue in the fifth season. A lot of people thought what Trump was doing was the more they try to self destruct because they don’t want office, the more the crowd gathers around them. Which was a viable theory about Trump.
Hurwitz also claims that the fifth season would have prefigured the fascination with true crime that has developed in the intervening years:
We were also building to a murder mystery and we were laying all these clues, and it was before there was this sudden interest in true crime with Fred Durst, Making a Murderer, and OJ. And there were so many OJ references in the fourth season. We even had Gob find a perfectly good OJ Simpson in the dumpster behind the wax museum. He was, like, driving around with this OJ Simpson and that was going to fit into the murder plot. But we’ll find new things. I’m trying, man.
One major problem of the fourth season was the difficulty in getting the whole cast together in the same room, resulting in large swathes of time where individual characters were basically off on their own. What Hurwitz didn’t really address were the gaps between the first three seasons of the show, which ran from 2003-2006, and the fourth, which didn’t air until 2013. Seven years is a long time to let a cast percolate, and there’s a sense in which the series had lost its momentum in a serious way.
That being said, all shows go through their peaks and troughs, and Hurwitz sounds quite dedicated to making the fifth season happen. If he manages it, I’m sure that he’ll get enough people to tune in – either on a network or on Netflix – to justify making that season. For now, however, we’ll just have to try and enjoy the seasons of Arrested Development that we do have, and wait to see if we’ll ever get another one.
